1. Field
Embodiments of the invention relate to the field of networking; and more specifically, to reducing service outages and/or loss of network traffic in networking by providing inter-chassis redundancy.
2. Background Information
In networking it is generally desirable to prevent service outages and/or loss of network traffic. Commonly, such service outages and/or loss of network traffic may tend to occur when there is a failure in a hardware resource of a network element. For example, a control card or line card of the network element may fail.
On approach to help reduce the risks of service outages and/or loss of network traffic is to provide redundant or backup hardware resources within the network element. For example, the network element may include a pair of control cards, where one control card represents an active control card and the other control card represents a standby or backup control card. The active control card may be responsible for handling traffic, and may synchronize data sufficient to handle the traffic to the standby control card. The standby control card may serve as a hot standby or backup control card that is capable of becoming active and handling the traffic if the active control card fails.
The use of such redundant hardware resources within the network element help to provide intra-chassis redundancy. In intra-chassis redundancy, data sufficient to handle traffic is replicated to different physical hardware resources and/or different physical locations within in the chassis of the network element. Such intra-chassis redundancy generally helps to provide resilience against (e.g., prevent or at least reduce), the risks of service outages and/or loss of network traffic in the event of certain types of failures (e.g., software process crashes and/or failure of one or more backed up hardware resources within the chassis of the network element). However, such intra-chassis redundancy is incapable of preventing service outages and/or loss of network traffic in other scenarios.